1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention relates to telecommunications, and in particular, to the dynamic selection of resources for providing high quality of service applications.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Recent advances in telecommunication technologies have made possible the wide spread use of broadband application services. For example, Internet phone calling, in the form of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service, has become very popular. In addition, video on demand services and personal data services, as well as other services, have gained widespread acceptance. Along with the spread of broadband services has come the advent of truly mobile broadband experiences, such as EvDO, WiFi, and WiMax.
As these services have become more and more popular, significant challenges have arisen to their provisioning and delivery. One problem in particular relates to the quality of services provided. Namely, carriers and service providers have found it difficult to provide real-time services with reliable levels of quality of service. For example, bandwidth requirements for a service often times cannot be met. As a result, end users experience degraded service quality.
One reason why reliable, high quality services are not yet the norm is that broadband services are currently provisioned and delivered using pre-broadband technologies. For instance, the Domain Name Service (DNS) is used to establish real-time communication sessions between end devices. Typically, DNS allocates applications according to the needs of the applications. For example, DNS will load balance application requests across several application servers running the same application to avoid over extending the resources of any one particular server.
Unfortunately, the needs of the requesting end device, such as a mobile phone, smart, phone, or PDA, are not consider during current service allocation processes. Thus, whether a user is accessing a service through EvDo over a CDMA network, or through WiFi over the public Internet, DNS will set up the session without regard to the current access method. As a result, users experience suboptimal real-time communication sessions. It would be better if both the performance requirements of a session and the performance capabilities of the access method could be considered when provisioning and delivering broadband services.